I represent the first generation who, when we were born, the television was now a permanent fixture in our homes. When I was born people had breakfast with Barbara Walters, dinner with Walter Cronkite, and slept with Johnny Carson.
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January 28, 1984

Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer First aired on CBS.

The show follows the adventures of Mike Hammer, the fictitious private detective created by crime novelist Mickey Spillane, as he works to solve cases, often involving murder. A recurring plot line throughout the show focusses on the murder of someone the protagonist was close to, resulting in Hammer seeking out revenge. Keach was familiar with the tough and insensitive novelized version of Hammer and worked to make his version more palatable to a television audience. "We've softened him up a little bit," Keach told The New York Times. "To sustain a series on television, I think you need a certain humor, charm and vulnerability. Toughness is probably the least important factor."

While firmly situated in the 1980s, the tone of the show also incorporated elements of classic film noir detective films, such as The Maltese Falcon. For example, each show featured the protagonist's narrative voice-over and, much like the archetypal hard-boiled detectives of years gone by, Hammer would rarely be seen without his wrinkled suit, fedora and trench coat. While his get-up made a particularly awkward fashion statement for the time, the juxtaposition of old and new was a central theme in the show. Indeed, Keach's Mike Hammer left the viewer with the impression that this detective had been somehow transported from a 1940s film set to 1980s New York City. The show's theme song "Harlem Nocturne" by Earle Hagen, a jazz tune featuring a deeply melancholy saxophone, set a gritty tone for each episode. The song proved to be one of the most popular elements of the program.

In contrast to the charming male leads in other popular detective shows of the day (e.g., Remington Steele, Thomas Magnum), Mike Hammer was unapologetically masculine with little concern for political correctness. A prominent feature of most episodes was the inclusion of a number of female characters (known in casting sessions "Hammer-ettes") who would exchange a double entendre or two with Hammer while wearing very low tops and push-up bras emphasizing their ample cleavage. Hammer would regularly wind up in bed with the highly sexualized female characters in the show, who would never fail to melt once they had fixed their eyes upon the brawny detective. The show's writers latched on to this element of clashing eras and often used it as a comic relief in the show. Examples of this include Hammer's love for cigarettes being at odds with the growing social disdain for smoking and the detective's humorous inability to comprehend the youth trends of the decade. Like its 1950s predecessor, Keach's Mike Hammer never shied away from violence. Whether it was with his fists or his trusty gun, "Betsy," a Colt Model 1911A1 .45 ACP semi-automatic pistol, which was always tucked neatly inside a leather shoulder holster worn under his suit jacket, Hammer would never fail to stop a criminal dead in his tracks. Mickey Spillane insisted that Stacy Keach carry the .45 caliber pistol in the show because that was the weapon Mike Hammer carried in all of Spillane's "Mike Hammer" mystery novels. Unlike most detective shows of the decade, the bad guys on Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer were usually killed by the protagonist by the time the closing credits rolled.

January 31, 1949

These Are My Children, the first
daytime soap opera, debuts on NBC.

The show, only 15 minutes long, aired weekdays at 5 p.m. in January and
February 1949.

January 31, 1984

NBC
Newsman Edwin Newman retired after 35 years with the network.

February 1, 1954CBS-TV aired The Secret Storm for the first time.

The story follows the Ames family,
a prominent clan in the fictional Northeastern town of Woodbridge (eventually
identified as being located in New York). The Ames family initially consisted
of Peter,
his wife Ellen, and their three children: Susan,
Jerry, and Amy. However, Ellen was killed in the first episode and
subsequent stories focused on Peter raising his three children. Lending a hand,
however dubiously, was Peter's sister-in-law, as well as his former
fiancée Pauline Rysdale (Haila
Stoddard).

Despite Susan's and Pauline's
efforts to derail any new romances in Peter's life, he eventually remarried two
more times. His first remarriage was to Myra Lake (June Graham), one of Amy's
teachers, but that ended in divorce. His second and more successful remarriage
was to divorcee Valerie Hill (Lori March), to whom he was married until his
death.

Later, the villainous Belle
Clemens (Marla Adams) was the main source of trouble for
Woodbridge, taking over from Aunt Pauline, the show's original villain.
Originally due to die of kidney disease, the writers had Belle's daughter Robin
drown in an accident. Belle blamed Amy for the death.

February 2, 2014

The End of NBC Burbank

In October 2007, the network
announced that it planned to move most of its operations from Burbank to a new
complex across the street from Universal
Studios in Universal City. It would retain
offices at the Burbank site until May 2013, though the studio complex was sold
to Catalina/Worthe Real Estate Group in 2008 with NBCUniversal leasing space
until 2013. The former Technicolor building on the Universal lot serves as the
new home to NBC's West Coast Operations. KNBC 4 and NBC News, along
with KVEA
Telemundo 52, began broadcasting from Universal Studios on February 2,
2014.

In preparation for the move, The Ellen DeGeneres Show moved to
the nearby Warner Bros. Studios in 2008, and
when Conan O'Brien assumed hosting duties, The Tonight Show moved
to an all-digital studio on the Universal lot in 2009. The
Jay Leno Show continued to broadcast from the NBC Burbank studios
as Leno's Tonight Show had, though from Studio 11. From March
1, 2010 to February 6, 2014, Leno's second run as host of The Tonight
Show taped at Studio 11.

The Tonight Show moved
back to New York City in 2014 when Jimmy
Fallon replaced Leno as host, marking the end of the 42-year era in
which the show had taped from Southern California.

The Burbank facility was one of the
few television-specific studio facilities in Hollywood that offered tours to
the general public until they ceased July 6, 2012.

On March 13, 2014, Lawrence O'Donnell announced that his MSNBC
broadcast that night would be the last nationally televised network show to be
broadcast live from NBC's Burbank studio, with the move of the NBC News Los
Angeles bureau to Universal City.

January 21, 1959

Carl Switzer, better known as Alfalfa from the Our Gang comedies, is shot and killed in
a brawl.Switzer, who became a
hunting guide and bartender in Northern California after his acting career
fizzled, was shot after an argument over a $50 debt. Authorities ruled the
shooting "justifiable homicide."

January 23, 2004

He was survived by three children, Michael Derek, Laurie
Margaret, and Maeve Jeanne. His wife of 45 years, Anne Jeanne Laurie
Keeshan, died February 25, 1996. Keeshan's grandson, Britton Keeshan,
became the youngest person at that time to have climbed the Seven Summits
by climbing Mount Everest in May 2004. He carried
photographs of his grandfather on that ascent, and buried a photo of the two of
them at the summit.

January 25, 1949

The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences
presents its first industry award at the Hollywood Athletic Club in Los
Angeles.

The Emmy for most popular
program went to Pantomime Quiz Time, and puppeteer Shirley Dinsdale and
her puppet Judy Splinters won an award for Outstanding TV Personality. Most of
the awards were for programs produced by TV station KTLA. The station also won
an award for Outstanding Overall Achievement.

January
26, 1979

The
Dukes of Hazzard
premieres.

On this day in 1979, The Dukes of Hazzard, a television
comedy about two good-old-boy cousins in the rural South and their souped-up
1969 Dodge Charger known as the General Lee, debuts on CBS. The show, which
originally aired for seven seasons, centered around cousins Bo Duke (John
Schneider) and Luke Duke (Tom Wopat) and their ongoing efforts to elude their
nemeses, the crooked county commissioner "Boss" Jefferson Davis
Hogg (Sorrell Booke) and the bumbling Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane (James Best).

The Dukes of
Hazzard was known for its car chases
and stunts and the General Lee, which had an orange paint job, a Confederate
flag across its roof and the numbers "01" on its welded-shut doors,
became a star of the show. The General Lee also had a horn that played the first
12 notes of the song "Dixie." Due to all the fast driving, jumps and
crashes, it was common for several different General Lees to be used during the
filming of each episode.

The General Lee also had a CB (Citizens Band) radio
and Luke and Bo Duke's CB nicknames or "handles" were Lost Sheep #1
and Lost Sheep #2, respectively. "The Dukes of Hazzard" (along with
the 1977 trucking movie "Smokey and the Bandit") helped promote the
CB craze that swept America from the mid 1970s to
the early 1980s.

Among the other cars featured on the show were Boss
Hogg's white Cadillac Deville convertible, Uncle Jesse Duke's (Denver Pyle) Ford
pickup truck and various tow trucks and vehicles belonging to Cooter Davenport
(Ben Jones), the local mechanic. Bo and Luke's short-shorts wearing cousin
Daisy Duke (Catherine Bach) drove a yellow Plymouth Roadrunner with black
stripes and later a Jeep with a golden eagle emblem on the hood and the word
"Dixie" on the doors.

The final episode of The Dukes of Hazzard originally aired on August 16, 1985. The show
spawned several TV specials and a 2005 movie starring Johnny Knoxville, Seann William
Scott and Jessica Simpson.

"En mi Viejo San Juan" (English: In my Old San Juan) is a composition by Puerto Rican composer and singer Noel Estrada. Interpreted by numerous singers and translated into various languages, the song is "widely known around the world". There are musical interpretations in German, English and French. At least over 1,000 distinct recordings of the song have been made worldwide.

The song was written in 1942 for Estrada's brother who had been deployed to Panama during World War II and was feeling nostalgia for his Puerto Rico motherland.The song has become an anthem of Puerto Rican emigration to New York.

January 15, 1974

The first episode of Happy Days airs.

A minor character,
super-cool biker Arthur "The Fonz" Fonzarelli, soon came to be the
show's central character. The immensely popular series was the most highly
rated comedy in the 1976-77 TV season and stayed in the Top 20 most highly
rated shows for seven of its 10 seasons. It launched several spin-offs,
including Laverne & Shirley and Mork & Mindy.

January 16, 1949

KNBC Channel 4 in Los Angeles first went on the air
with the call letters KNBH (NBC Hollywood).

The station debuted with
three hours and forty minutes of programming, which followed a fifteen-minute
test pattern-and-music session. The programming included an eighteen-minute
newsreel, a Review of 1948, LA’s
first variety show called On the Show,
and station’s first live program The Pickard
Family, featuring Dad and Mom Pickard and their four children singing
familiar American songs. By October 1949, KNBH had extended its operating
schedule from five to seven days a week, with approximately twenty-six hours of
television programming each week.

In November 1962 the station
relocated to the network's color broadcast studio facility in "Beautiful
Downtown Burbank" known then as NBC Color City. With the move the call
letters were changed again to KNBC. NBC took the KNBC identity from its San Francisco radio
station (which then became KNBR).

NBC
Studio in Burbank became home to Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (Where announcer
Gary Owens first coined the term “Beautiful downtown Burbank)". It was
also the home to Sanford and Son, Chico and the Man, the daytime drama Days of Our Lives, countless game shows
and most notably since 1972 The Tonight
Show with Johnny Carson and later Jay Leno.

On October
11, 2007, NBC-Universal announced
that it would sell its Burbank studios and construct a new, all-digital
facility near the Universal Studios
lot. This is in an effort to merge all of NBC-Universal's West Coast operations
into one area. When Conan O'Brien took over The Tonight Showhe shot in Universal’s Sound Stage 1
(The former home to The Jack Benny
Program).

And now for the news.

On a personal note: As
someone who grew up in Southern California there were many local news stories
that later received national or even international attention. I can also say
that Channel 4 was making news while they were covering the news.

May
17th 1974 Channel 4 and other local TV stations covered a house in
Compton that had been commandeered by the Symbionese Liberation Army, the
revolutionary group that three months earlier had kidnapped 19-year-old
Patricia Hearst (The granddaughter of the legendary newspaper baron). This was
the first time I ever remember channel surfing because the event was being
covered LIVE (not “Film at 11). Viewers got to see events play out as they
happened. Shortly after 5 p.m. Los Angeles police, sheriffs and FBI agents
closed in on the house. The house caught fire and 6 bodies were later
recovered. Patty Hearst was not there.

In the summer of 1987 during
an afternoon newscast, a gun-wielding mental patient took consumer reporter David Horowitz
and the rest of the Channel 4 news team hostage while they were live on the
air. The gunman was the son of a former Channel 4 News contributor and an
invited guest of one of the news team members. As soon as the gunman appeared
on camera the station stopped broadcasting the news, but as far as the gunman
knew they were ON THE AIR. Viewers would later see tape of Horowitz calmly
reading the gunman's statement on camera with a gun pointed at him. After
Horowitz finished reading the statement the gunman surrendered his toy gun and
was arrested. This event led Horowitz (whose long running syndicated series, Fight Back! originated from Channel 4)
to start a successful campaign to ban "look-alike" toy guns in
several states, including California
and New York.

Later that year on October 1st
1987 viewers watched anchorman Kent Shocknek
and weatherman Christopher Nance dive under their news desk during an after
shock from the Whittier Narrows earthquake. Kent Shocknek would never live down
this event and forever be known as Kent “After-Shocknek”. It should also be
noted that Kent Shocknek was later honored by the Red Cross and by a few cities
for demonstrating how to behave during an earthquake.

On April 30th
1992, the second day of the Los Angeles Riots, KNBC News was covering the
historic event nonstop. But that evening the station decided to suspend it’s
around the clock riot coverage to air the series finale of The
Cosby Show giving viewers a brief Mental
Sorbet. Following the broadcast Bill
Cosby went on the air and asked Angelinos to pray for peace.

This studio hosted production of many of the
best-remembered game and variety shows from the 1950s through the 1990s,
including The Tonight Show beginning in 1972. In that year, Johnny
Carson moved the show to California from New York where it remained until 2009
when Jay Leno handed hosting duties to Conan O'Brien. During the late 1960s,
the Carson Tonight Show would move for periods to Burbank, using the Bob
Hope Stage 3 to video-tape a live feed to the East Coast. After the
permanent move to Burbank, Bob Hope's show taped on Stage 3, with The
Tonight Show taking a hiatus while Hope produced his specials.

January 17, 1949

The
Goldbergs debuts as television's first situation comedy.

The show, which evolved from a nearly 20-year-old
popular radio program of the same name, followed the adventures of a
middle-class Jewish family in the Bronx. Gertrude Berg played gossipy housewife
Molly Goldberg, and Philip Loeb played her husband, Jake, who worked in the
clothing business. They had two teenagers, Sammy and Rosalie.

In each episode, the
family would face another typical middle-class problem--and Molly enjoyed
trying to help the neighbors in her apartment complex solve their problems,
too. Later, when the fictitious family moved from the Bronx to suburban
Haverville, the cast was joined by philosophical Uncle David, Sammy's fiancee
(who later became his wife), her mother, and new neighbors. In 1952, Loeb was
blacklisted for alleged Communist sympathies.

The
show's sponsor, General Foods, dropped the series, and the show moved to
NBC-without Loeb, though Berg had fought to keep him aboard. Loeb declared
under oath he had never been a member of the Communist Party, and the charges
were never proved, but his career was destroyed. He died in 1955 after taking a
fatal overdose of sleeping pills in a hotel room. The show ran until 1954.

January 17, 1994

The Northridge earthquake at 04:31 Pacific Standard Time in Reseda,
a neighborhood in Los Angeles, California, lasting for about 10–20 seconds.

The earthquake had a "strong" moment magnitude
(Mw) of 6.7, but the ground acceleration
was one of the highest ever instrumentally recorded in an urban area in North
America, measuring 1.8g (16.7 m/s2) with strong ground
motion felt as far away as Las Vegas, Nevada, about 220 miles
(360 km) from the epicenter. The peak ground velocity in this earthquake
at the Rinaldi Receiving station was 183 cm/s (6.59 km/h or
4.09 mph), the fastest peak ground velocity ever recorded. In addition,
two 6.0 Mwaftershocks occurred. The first about
1 minute after the initial event and the second approximately 11 hours later,
the strongest of several thousand aftershocks in all. The death toll came to a
total of 57 people, and there were over 8,700 injured. In addition, the
earthquake caused an estimated $20 billion in damage, making it one of the
costliest natural disasters in U.S. history.

All of the earthquake sequences in the Wes Craven
film New Nightmare
were filmed a month prior to the Northridge quake. The real quake struck only
weeks before filming was completed. Subsequently, a team was sent out to film
footage of the quake damaged areas of the city. The cast and crew had initially
thought that the scenes that were filmed before the real quake struck were a
bit overdone, but when viewed after the real quake hit, they were horrified by
the realism of it.

Some archives of film and entertainment programming were also affected. For
example, the original 35 mm master films for the 1960s sitcom My Living Doll
were destroyed in the earthquake.The earthquake knocked Los Angeles'
radio and television stations off the air. However, they later came back on the
air for earthquake coverage.

Radio stations such as KFI, KFWB and KNX were on the
air during the main tremor, causing severe static on the airwaves. KROQ-FM's Kevin and Bean
morning show asked those people tuned in to stay out of their homes. KLOS Morning Duo Mark & Brian's
morning show was also affected. The duo spoke to Los Angeles area residents
about their situation.

FM radio stations such as KRTH, KIIS-FM, KOST-FM and
KCBS-FM were bringing special reports on the earthquake when morning show host Robert W. Morgan,
Rick Dees and
Charlie Tuna were calling Los Angeles residents and others from its sister
stations to bring their belongings to the station and advising people not to
drink water.

January 18, 1974

Six
Million Dollar Man debuts.

The
popularity of the Six Million Dollar Man, starring Lee Majors as Steve
Austin, the world's first bionic man, inspires a superhero trend in the late
1970s, which spawns shows like Wonder Woman in 1976 and The
Incredible Hulk in 1978. In 1975 two-part episode entitled The Bionic
Woman introduced the character of Jaime
Sommers, a
professional tennis player who rekindled an old romance with Austin, only to
experience a parachuting accident that resulted in her being given bionic parts
similar to Austin. Ultimately, however, her bionics failed and she died. The
character was very popular, however, and the following season she was revived
(having been cryogenically frozen) and was given her own spin-off series, The Bionic Woman, which lasted until 1978 when both it and The Six
Million Dollar Man were simultaneously cancelled.Steve Austin and Jaime Sommers returned in three subsequent made-for-television
movies:

The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman (1987), Bionic
Showdown (1989) — which featured Sandra Bullock in an early role as a new bionic woman; and Bionic
Ever After? (1994) in which Austin and Sommers finally marry. Majors
reprised the role of Steve Austin in all three productions, which also featured
Richard Anderson and Martin E. Brooks.

CHILD OF TELEVISION @ iTunes

Pre-ramble

I represent the first generation whom, when we were born, the television was now a permanent fixture in our homes. When I was born people had breakfast with Barbara Walters, dinner with Walter Cronkite, and slept with Johnny Carson.
Read the full "Pre-ramble"